


Must Dirk Strider be 'good'? Is it not enough to be a bitch, loudly?

by queerasnix



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Character Study, Essays, Excessive Sadboy Feelings, Just working some stuff out, Meta, Nonfiction, Other, Personal Growth, Trans Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-13
Updated: 2020-11-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:09:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27578960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queerasnix/pseuds/queerasnix
Summary: AN ESSAY INTO QUEER MASCULINITY AND NARRATIVE BETRAYALThis essay discusses material from Homestuck, the Homestuck Epilogues, and Homestuck^2 as of November 13, 2020. Spoiler warnings as well as trigger warnings for these stories apply to this essay.
Kudos: 1





	1. Introduction / The Ultimate Self

**Author's Note:**

> Title pinched from https://twitter.com/hulknaps/status/1270101814600437767

> The story is a dream of healing, but it is not healing in and of itself. … The story is a dream of the revolution, but it is not a revolution on its own. … The story is a dream of love and the seed of love and a map for love, but it takes people, not stories, to love each other. And here, the storyteller learns that the life of the story and the life of the teller are separate, though intertwined. The storyteller comes to understand that the telling of a good story is not the same as living a full life, though one informs the other. The storyteller learns that the love a story-listener has for the story is not the same as the love of one person for another.  
>  _—Kai Cheng Thom, from “The School for Storytellers,” I Hope We Choose Love_

It took me roughly the first 22 years of life to figure out that I am not a story writer. I met this idea with such stubbornness because I have always clung to stories as a life raft of meaning and purpose, and thought surely this meant I too would become a great storyteller. My own attempts at original stories spiralled into distraction and were left unfinished, and/or were full of remixed, rehashed, or straight-up plagiarized elements of the stories I loved. After wandering in the desert of poetry and vaguely sound-based performance art for another decade or so, I return with renewed purpose to my true calling in life: talking about other people’s stories, largely as a means of talking about myself.

At the risk of attempting to speak for a wide swath of people, not all of whom are exactly like me, I think trans people are often also drawn to stories in a specifically metatextual way because ours are lives that are continually being rewritten, either by ourselves or someone else, and you’d better believe that if we don’t grab the reins of our own personal narratives, someone else will. Drawing out the structural and cultural meaning of the stories I interact with operates for me as a cipher code for figuring out who and what the hell I am. In addition to being dramatically lower-stakes and lower-cost in comparison to, say, psychotherapy, unraveling the lives of fictional people as broken and traumatized as I am (or frequently more so) provides an infinity of reflections, refractions, and overlapping Venn diagrams that provide a map for being in individuation and in relation to the people around me.

Which brings me to Homestuck. Perhaps by sheer volume, no narrative is more fertile ground for readings of gender, sexuality, queerness, and how to form as a person in response to arbitrarily limited sets of options and data, and in the face of world-breaking moral dilemma. This bad boy can hold so much interpretation. And there’s a particular bad boy within this bad boy, himself absolutely brimming with interpretive bullshit, that I can’t seem to stop fixating on. His name is Dirk Strider. We’ll get to him in a moment.

I intentionally refer to this writing as an essay _into_ queer masculinity and narrative betrayal because I want to be clear that by writing this essay I intend to explore, not provide an answer key. There are a lot of things this essay could do but that I have neither the time nor the inclination to attempt. Summarizing Homestuck is one of those things. Speculating on how Homestuck^2 will end is another. Laying out a plan for how Dirk’s character can be ‘saved’ or ‘redeemed,’ providing a detailed analysis of transformative and/or restorative justice, or putting the entire concept of masculinity on trial are also emphatically not among my goals. What I wanted to explore when I set about writing this essay was the question of whether Dirk _must_ be saved/redeemed, i.e., what it is we demand of Dirk’s story. Are we using Dirk’s story to make broader demands of queer masculinity as a whole? Do we need queer masculinity to dismantle patriarchy and toxic masculinity and wholeheartedly scrap the project of manhood throughout all projections of history? And more importantly, can we ask one heavily traumatized fictional dude to do all of that at once? What is it we want from Queer Representation? Are we asking for instructions or a mirror?

These are still pretty big questions, and there’s a lot of ground to cover here. So let me start with a simple concept we’re all totally familiar with:

### The Ultimate Self

At the heart of Homestuck is the necessity of believing that there’s a better version of yourself swirling out there in all of the possible realities, and that you can eventually become that version of yourself. Through the mechanics of the game-within-the-story, the many windows onto mortality and parallel universes that the story’s universe provides, and the metanarrative fuckery that pervades all of it, the characters of Homestuck are confronted with their alternate selves often and repeatedly, and through this act, the parameters of ‘better’ as it applies to a sense of self and a life lived are also called into question.

The parallels between this and trans stuff should be pretty self-evident; I’m forcing myself to elaborate anyway because I did state that my deepest motive in this exploration was to talk about myself. And how many times have I wistfully mumbled ‘this isn’t even my final form’ into the mirror? How many hours have I vaporized sitting on the couch and staring into space, waiting for the moment when I finally feel powerful? When do _I_ get to ascend to the god tiers? I feel and understand the temptation to draw a parallel between god tiering and transitioning; as my own transition has basically amounted to an aggregation of vague social gestures and may never progress beyond that point, not only do I not feel qualified to make that comparison, but doing so would also constitute a painful abnegation of my ability to ever become my own Ultimate Self. Such a metaphor would consign me in my indeterminate nonbinary gender, only ever declaring what I’m not and never what I am, to identity’s Furthest Ring, drifting among the reflections and refractions of people I could become if I just got my shit together one way or the other.

As far as he’s concerned, by the end of the Epilogues, Dirk has both become the Ultimate version of himself (by the game and the narrative’s standards) and also already met the best version of himself who is an entirely separate person from him, and that person is Dave.

Dirk’s relationship with Dave is a useful foothold in this exploration, and varies depending on the context among aspiration, mirror, and mentee. By the time Dirk is wrapping up the Epilogues, at least, he’s declared explicitly and in no uncertain terms that the strongest, kindest, most worthy version of himself is just Dave, and so the Dirk redemption project is terminated:

> The problem is, I think power like mine can only make antagonistic intent unavoidable. Who could wield such control over people’s choices and the course of events without ultimately becoming the enemy of anyone who notices? Maybe only a stronger person than I could manage to pull it off. Someone like Dave. …
> 
> … So yeah, the next time I die, let’s pencil it in as a Just Death. And let’s also have it on good authority that the next time Dave cuts off my head, it’ll be for good. 

Dirk has always modeled himself after some version of Dave. Before even becoming aware of or understanding the concept of the Ultimate Self according to Sburb/Paradox Space’s terms, Dirk built his entire conception of his best self first from the lore of Alpha Dave that he collected growing up alone in the middle of an endless ocean; that concept was then reframed after meeting Beta Dave and hearing about his counterpart’s abuse and neglect, and then presumably once again while living in proximity to Dave on Earth C and watching their personalities diverge. At various points throughout his life, Dirk must have internalized that he would have to become his own man, and at such points he must have also internalized that whoever that would be could never live up to the image he had built of Dave in his head and then interacted with for however many years.

At 23, I read Homestuck for the first time (I think I caught up just before [S] Wake), fell madly in love, and immediately purchased a replica of Dave’s broken record shirt. I wore it to my MFA graduation, what I then assumed would be the peak and/or the beginning of my adult life. I also felt like the best version of me probably already existed, and that it was probably also just Dave Strider.

Somewhere between the ages of 29 and 32, I internalized that I was trans, and that Dave had been the Second Impact of Gender[[1](%E2%80%9C#note1%E2%80%9D)], and that I too would never actually become Dave Strider.

There’s an important distinction I’m making here between your idealized self and The Ultimate Self. Textually, The Ultimate Self is not an aggregation of your ‘best’ qualities (whatever those may be) or your most powerful form, though I suppose under one interpretation it may be the clearest expression of one’s god tier abilities -- but really, as far as I can tell, what it shows up as across the sprawling corpus of Homestuck is the sum total of your Most qualities across all timelines. It’s a complete suffusing of all of your most magnified tendencies:

> As you know, I have many splinters. So many, I used to find it overwhelming to contemplate them all. Depressing, actually. It was a feeling I could never escape from. The feeling that my sense of self was limitless. That I was forced to exist as a small facet of my own potential, while drowning in an ocean of my greater persona, and all the terrible things I was fully capable of. I was trapped as a limited version of myself who was still burdened by the concern for what it meant to be good, struggling to keep himself from drowning in an overwhelming body of potential which had no concern for human morality whatsoever.
> 
> But that struggle finally ended a few years ago. My head isn't fighting to stay above the water anymore. There isn't even a metaphorical head to speak of. I'm only the water now.
> 
> It's proven to be an immensely comforting way for me to exist. It reminds me of the feelings I had during long nights alone, looking out over the dark ocean which surrounded me. The ocean that effectively raised me, because nothing else was around to do it. During those lonely nights I spent many hours wondering what would happen, what would even be the difference, if I jumped in and never came up. If I simply disappeared.
> 
> But now I finally have. I've disappeared into the infinity of myself. And I am... _magnificent._

So, to recap, Dirk’s preeminent Ultimate Self qualities are: loneliness, need for control, need to realize his full potential, disregard for the ordinary laws of man. (And, to be fair, this is also his narration of what he sees as an idealized version of himself, but when you’re a narcissist, the line between ideal self and Ultimate Self naturally gets a lot fuzzier.) Idk, bro, sounds pretty gay to me. Which is to say, I read the qualities with which Dirk describes his Ultimate Self and hear loudly reflected back at me the state of being queer in a heteronormative world: the feeling that you are the only one of your kind for miles; the feeling that there is so much more to your personhood and expression that you can see clearly but that remains just slightly out of reach; the feeling that to embrace that potential would be to defy all of the sociocultural conditioning you’ve spent your life steeping in. And the feeling that you have to do it anyway. The terrifying relief that comes with it.

There’s a strong connection between Dirk’s need for control over his life/circumstances and his need to model himself after Dave, someone who is the Designated Hero, someone who is destined for purpose:

> TT: See, to be perfectly honest, we are a party of losers.  
>  TT: Heroes make shit happen. But that's not what we do, or what we're even SUPPOSED to do.  
>  TT: We wait.  
>  TT: We wait for literally everything. We wait for other people to reach out first so we can fix our relationships. We wait for these legendary heroes to arrive and bring competence and promise to a futile situation.  
>  TT: Even now. Look at us. What are we waiting for?  
>  TT: To kill ourselves? For someone to come along and do it for us?  
>  TT: It doesn't even matter.  
>  TT: As the four nobles of the void session, we do what we were created to do.  
>  TT: We sit around on our asses.  
>  TT: Waiting.  
>  TT: We were all designated for a session that was utterly inert.  
>  TT: A place where the mechanisms for success never even existed to begin with.  
>  TT: In such a place it makes sense that the formal leader would be neutralized, to made feel unempowered and static.  
>  TT: And it seems particularly fitting she would be the noble of life in a realm of the dead.  
>  TT: A realm that foretold of a life player who felt lifeless, a hope player who felt hopeless, and a heart player who was just a stone cold motherfucker.  
>  TT: When we talked about leadership, and I was all on my high horse telling you how shit would go down...  
>  TT: I also said I would be the one "pulling the strings." Remember? That I'd be the functional leader of our party.  
>  TT: And there might have been something to that, in a different session.  
>  TT: But what good is a "man of action" in a place where action itself is intrinsically fruitless?

This connection suffuses his narrative arc: is he talking here about post-flood Earth? about the Void Session? about Earth C? One of these answers is canonically correct, but also they all are. When Dirk does decide to become his own man, he knows he’s going to have to do it in contrast, in opposition, against the parameters of this ideal he’s created. No, you don’t get to become the embodiment of your own beacon of comfort and morality. You can only become yourself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1 The First Impact was in 1999, when I spent an entire summer doing almost nothing but playing Ocarina of Time and watching all the Luke parts from the first three Star Wars movies. The Third Impact was in 2020, when I finally finished Final Fantasy VIII and realized I have been Squall Leonhart this entire time.  [ [return to text](%E2%80%9C#return1%E2%80%9D) ]


	2. Constructing a Model of Masculine Identity / Narrative and Betrayal

### Constructing a Model of Masculine Identity

Recently, I explained to my sister that I was writing this essay and she asked me if there was anything about masculinity that appealed to me in particular. I floundered through some stuff about homosocial love and service in Lord of the Rings, and then the conversation spun off into the ways that patriarchy has failed in our family structure, but what I had really meant to talk about was knights.

Homestuck has plenty to say about knights, and noted Homestuck scholar optimisticDuelist probably has the clearest (i.e. my favorite) explanation[2](%E2%80%9C#note2%E2%80%9D) of what Homestuck has to say about knights, so what I’ll say about knights is that a small, childish part of me has been fixated on being one ever since I read Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness books, and every time I encounter a knight figure in fiction I feel a familiar but slightly indescribable gut twist, the feeling that a lot of queer trans people probably know very well: the asymptotic feeling that straddles recognition and desire.

The other thing I’ll say about knights is that love and service are inseparably intertwined, and that the threat/offer to die repeatedly and often is a foundational part of both. Thanks to conditional immortality, Homestuck knights can make good on this threat repeatedly and often. The obvious example is Dave, as the story’s most active and ascended knight, and his many time copies, but Dirk’s repeated insistence on sacrifice also plays into the knight figure. In Act 6 Act 6 Act 6, this act is positioned as heroic (lining his head up with the various Jacks so that Dave is forced to take the open shot); but even in this moment and in the Epilogues, Dirk repeatedly offers up his death as a cathartic sacrifice in service of both Dave and Jake’s trauma, and specifically the trauma that he and his splinters have caused.

Where am I going with this in relation to myself? That’s a great question. I’m writing this particular section from a trip to a cabin in the mountains, where I am currently several margaritas deep. My partner and dearest friends are struggling to use the right pronouns and language to refer to me, two years after formally coming out, and I’m constantly forgiving them. This isn’t a performative or exhausted forgiveness -- I really get it at this point. And yet I’m aware that I am offering my own comfort and actualization as a sacrifice to make sure that my loved ones can understand, accommodate, and continue loving me. The knight complex is, most simplistically, about putting everyone else’s comfort and happiness before your own, but beyond that, it’s also about creating a version of yourself that can be loved. It’s about repeatedly and endlessly striving to earn love that should already be unconditional. The knight project is constantly saying, no, really, I can be worthy, and I’ll wait as long and work as hard as it takes for me to believe it when you say you love me. For me to believe that I deserve it.

While reading Jenny Odell’s _How to Do Nothing,_ an incredible book on, basically, how to be a functioning human organism in an ecosystem instead of the various bullshit capitalism is trying to get you to do, I found myself thinking again about knights when I came across this excerpt Odell quoted from the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ ‘Manifesto for Maintenance Art’:

> _The Death Instinct and the Life Instinct:  
>  The Death Instinct: separation, individuality, Avant-Garde par excellence; to follow one’s own path—do your own thing; dynamic change.  
>  The Life Instinct: unification; the eternal return; the perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species; survival systems and operations, equilibrium._

Odell goes on to explain that one of these instincts is routinely valorized and masculinized, and we can all guess which one it is. What struck me is that Homestuck sees the knight class (and, though he is not formally a knight, especially Dirk) distort the life instinct into the death instinct in order to fulfill the narrative demands of Sburb, and more broadly to fulfill the demands of a masculinized state of exception that demands endless violence in the name of protection and survival. And while this state of exception defines the kind of hyperaggressive, protest-too-much martial masculinity that we have come to define more broadly as toxic masculinity, to the point that a carceral view of the gender binary regresses into conflating all masculinity as toxic, I’d also argue that the knight also has the power to queer the death instinct into the life instinct: the knight wears the death instinct’s aesthetics of individualism, dynamism, and the avant-garde in the acts of self-negation and self-sacrifice, while sole and stated purposes of those acts are unification, perpetuation, equilibrium.

But despite his erstwhile attempts to fulfill the relational requirements of the knight figure, Dirk is still not, by player class or by personality, a knight. He’s got his own shit going on. It’s kind of impossible to talk about Dirk without at least mentioning Gurren Lagann, on whose iconic older brother tough guy manly man image Dirk’s original character design was founded, and from which his otherwise completely inexcusable Ultimate tier outfit is ripped almost piece for piece, give or take a (sleeveless) shirt. Gurren Lagann is its own ridiculous thing that probably deserves its own essay, but Dirk’s basis in Kamina is both metatextual and diegetic.[3](%E2%80%9C#note3%E2%80%9D) Even without the knowledge of his role reversal on pre-Scratch Earth, Kamina fits a role that Dirk would have no trouble inserting himself into: the undisputed leader of the ragtag bunch of misfits trying to build a habitable world and compelling story out of dirt, a spiritual/philosophical beacon if not a calculating puppetmaster, carving away the naivete and cowardice from his mentees with tough love like a sculptor taking to a block of marble (Dirk would also appreciate a nod to the classics). And as the offspring of a world that forcibly alienated him from his own history, leaving him to cherry-pick and cobble together the most relevant fragments of others, Dirk’s identity is forged in pastiche, collage, and mistranslation. His higher concept of What Is A Man is primarily Wikipedia Western philosophy and Japanese martial culture as filtered through the colonial gaze and repackaged into cartoons.

Speaking of martial readings, there’s another, subtler lens on Dirk’s custom-fabricated masculinity that informs both of those influences and exists parallel to the knight figure: the classical figure of Mars and the type of masculinity that I described earlier as the masculinity of the state of exception. This is queer astrologer Alice Sparkly Kat’s reading of the Mars myth[4](%E2%80%9C#note4%E2%80%9D); in brief, it’s the kind of masculinity that emerges as a complaint of proof against circumstances that are designed to humiliate and cast out. It’s the inverse of the ‘no, I can be worthy’ of knighthood: the ‘no, I am a man’ of the man who gets the faintest whiff of suggestion that he might not be a man.[5](%E2%80%9C#note5%E2%80%9D) This, again, is the masculinity that drives the Death impulse, and the Death impulse is what overtakes Dirk’s trajectory once he exits canon and loses the purpose toward which he’d built the first 16 years of his life. Dirk has framed his life in the myth of Sburb as a means of survival, as a way to explain the otherwise unacceptably horrific circumstances he’s born into, and being forcibly ejected from that myth has the natural result of either trying to scrape together a facsimiled rehash from its itinerant fragments, or abject nihilism. Living in a post-myth state,[6](%E2%80%9C#note6%E2%80%9D) the rules that shaped you, for better or for worse, remain suspended in your consciousness but no longer materially apply, and what’s left is a terrifyingly open-ended, nauseating chaos of thus-far forbidden alternate potentialities. If you were waiting for me to connect this to gender again somehow (which, like, I get that I’ve set that expectation by now but also god why would you continue to indulge me), your prayer has been answered: my experience of gender roles and specifically the feminine was a myth that fell apart under repeated examination but continues to represent itself in surrounding circumstances no matter how many times I try to escape. And both of these states of post-myth can be likened to, you guessed it, states of exception, where the normative disintegrates and the only way to enforce norms is to implement increasingly unjustifiable means. These are the spaces where hyperaggressive performances of gender like protest masculinity thrive.

Protest masculinity is, of course, also a defense mechanism, and absolutely no one loves defense mechanisms more than Dirk. He’s had to build up a lot of defense mechanisms living in a world that is hostile to humans and to him specifically as a descendant of an important rebel human figure, and as a gay teen who struggles to accept his identity, and generally as a kid who has a lot of fucking feelings and knows, having surrounded himself with himself, how overbearing those feelings can be to others.[7](%E2%80%9C#note7%E2%80%9D) And post-canon Dirk takes his Death impulse all the way to its logical conclusion as villainy, which is a defense mechanism in itself:

> The problem is, I think power like mine can only make antagonistic intent unavoidable. Who could wield such control over people’s choices and the course of events without ultimately becoming the enemy of anyone who notices? Maybe only a stronger person than I could manage to pull it off. Someone like Dave. So when I say I know I need to be stopped, I guess it’s more than just accepting my end of a diabolical bargain. I know I need to be stopped, because I’m sure deep down, somewhere inside my infinitely recursive sense of self, I know what’s going on here is all just a little bit sick. To be honest, I’d consider killing myself and sparing reality all the trauma from the jump—I mean, a legit suicide, not one of those melodramatic faux-suicidal plays for attention, sympathy, or Jake’s dick. But to really do it for keeps? For a truly selfless purpose? Nah. Too cowardly for that. Too afraid to stop existing for good. Wouldn’t you be if you were me?

It’s easier to be cripplingly lonely when it’s impossible to imagine or confront what it would take not to be. The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known and that. But it’s not just about vulnerability in terms of being seen by others -- even in complete lockdown, Dirk is laughably transparent, and he knows there are obvious cracks in his façade. The actual crisis that’s impossible to face is the notion that someone might actually love you of their own volition, that you will be forced to accept a compliment about you that’s actually true, that the pain you’ve suffered isn’t because you cosmically deserve it in some way but because of machinations of cruelty that are far beyond your control and it turns out you were actually worthy this whole time.

I want to make it clear that I’m not interested in reducing people (or characters, even) to nothing but their trauma. For all his forged-in-fire approach, I’m sure Dirk would agree. And by giving us the post-myth sandbox of endless Homestuck content, I think Homestuck, or The Narrative, or whatever we want to call this vague authorial intent, or probably the actual author(s), would agree as well. But fantasy stories, because they do not describe our terribly boring and unjust reality, have a tendency to elicit a demand for clear morality. I hope the following experience is not universal, because I have personally spent a truly depressing amount of time watching loud people on the internet Cancelling Problematic Characters. I can’t attribute this to any one specific group or tendency, but I’m reminded of Sara Ahmed’s characterization of the wound of identity: ‘wound culture takes the injury of the individual … as an identity claim, such that ‘reaction’ against the injury forms the very basis of politics.’[8](%E2%80%9C#note8%E2%80%9D) And when filtered through the lens of an individualistic identity politics, this begins to feel like a reification of trauma as the most important and compelling thing, narratively speaking. If someone has suffered trauma, they are worthy. Your trauma is your passport[9](%E2%80%9C#note9%E2%80%9D) into the realm of legitimacy, recognition, acceptance. Bad things happen to good people, goes the prevailing narrative, and that transforms into this weird narrative demand that bad things must _make_ good people. Reducing Dirk to his trauma thereby demands that I redeem him, and I stated explicitly that my intent was not to do so, or even ask the question. So what is it I’m doing here again?

### Narrative and Betrayal

> As you know, I have many splinters. So many, I used to find it overwhelming to contemplate them all. Depressing, actually. It was a feeling I could never escape from. The feeling that my sense of self was limitless. That I was forced to exist as a small facet of my own potential, while drowning in an ocean of my greater persona, and all the terrible things I was fully capable of. I was trapped as a limited version of myself who was still burdened by the concern for what it meant to be good, struggling to keep himself from drowning in an overwhelming body of potential which had no concern for human morality whatsoever.
> 
> But that struggle finally ended a few years ago. My head isn't fighting to stay above the water anymore. There isn't even a metaphorical head to speak of. I'm only the water now.
> 
> It's proven to be an immensely comforting way for me to exist. It reminds me of the feelings I had during long nights alone, looking out over the dark ocean which surrounded me. The ocean that effectively raised me, because nothing else was around to do it. During those lonely nights I spent many hours wondering what would happen, what would even be the difference, if I jumped in and never came up. If I simply disappeared.
> 
> But now I finally have. I've disappeared into the infinity of myself. And I am... _magnificent._

The revelation that I was trans was met with the same combination of terror and joy that usually accompanies jumping off a big rock into a nice deep pool of water somewhere out in nature, which was physically confusing as what I was actually doing with my body at the time was lying down in my mother-in-law’s guest bedroom trying not to have a panic attack. The further revelation that my transness would necessitate the embodiment and expression of a lot more masculinity than I’d expected or been able to accept (i.e., the revelation that I was even more trans than I or anyone else had originally suspected) was met, initially, with a lot of crying. And then, a ferocious electricity. A kind of fearful power.

Even though writing a story about yourself as it’s currently happening to you is an activity best suited to metahuman, messy-bitch-disease-afflicted twinks who have stumbled across godlike power through a lot of fictional string-pulling, it’s something plenty of regular people try to do anyway. And as someone whose ideal embodiment strives toward ‘metahuman, messy-bitch-disease-afflicted twink who stumbles across godlike power,’ it’s something I find myself doing an uncomfortable majority of the time. I am obsessed, for example, with classpecting myself. (It has also been the clearest excuse I’ve ever come across to call myself a knight,[10](%E2%80%9C#note10%E2%80%9D) so by god I’m taking that shit all the way to the bank.) But whether or not what happens to me ends up being a sprawling epic that an alarming amount of people are interested in reading and then thinking about forever, on some level I have to keep writing a story about myself to keep myself sane, to feel like what I’m doing in the broad scheme of living my life has trajectory, purpose, something that combines meaning and material in a coherent if often fluctuating shape. (Hmm. Doesn’t this sound familiar?) While I’m doggedly trying to acquire messy bitch disease, I continue to load up on my can’t stop contemplating my existence disease.

In the first very sloppy and manic notes for this essay, I wrote this whole thing about Dirk being ‘Vriska for transmascs’ and about Vriska’s redemption arc(s), and then I stopped short on the phrase ‘Dirk gets a redemption arc because’ mostly for comedic effect, but also because I truly had no idea how to finish that thought. I floundered in my own Man Problems about it for a while, and then several weeks later and a few hundred words and several paragraphs ago I summarily declared that that question didn’t need answering, that the question didn’t even deserve to be asked. So let’s try to answer the question I posed instead: what the hell I’m doing here.

While I’m at it, let me also speedrun the Vriska component real quick. In short, Vriska Exists In A Narrative and stakes her worth on that story, but she also breaks the narrative by demanding and declaring herself as central in a narrative that is determined to abuse, humiliate, and dispose of her, and that’s a fucking transfeminine power fantasy if I’ve ever seen one. It is good and righteous and perennially one of my favorite things about Vriska’s story, and about Homestuck in general. It’s a narrative that so many of us genuinely Love To See and are rooting for, and it betrays so many other cultural narratives that, for better or worse (largely worse), we’ve become deeply entrained to: women, and particularly trans women, are disposable. People who hurt other people (regardless of how much power they actually held in that situation) get what’s coming to them, i.e. capital punishment. You do not get what you want/need just because you had the temerity to straight up ask for it; you must Earn It through opaque moral hierarchies. Flouting these conventions is what keeps the Vriskcourse machine churning, whichever side of it you happen to be on.[11](%E2%80%9C#note11%E2%80%9D) Betrayal, it turns out, is super fucking compelling.

Betrayal is the Dirk brainworm that I can’t dislodge. At its heart, the concept of Western queerness is a concept of refusal. The historical burden of Western queerness is to respond to centuries of compulsory heteronormativity, and the response that such a burden would demand seems to be, at minimum, to reject a dominant cultural categorization of gender and redefine it for oneself, and possibly to expand that rejection to fucking the concept of gender as hard as possible until it falls away completely.[12](%E2%80%9C#note12%E2%80%9D) And at the nexus of fucking the domesticated/reproductive sphere of heteronormativity into obsolescence and a masculinity that refuses to sit still, conform, or comply sits our boy, the Death Instinct himself.

The overarching Homestuck narrative theme that I keep returning to is something like finding pathways from extreme isolation to meaningful relation: people who can be home to each other. (Yes, yes, ‘home,’ I get it.) This plays out in the one ship that Homestuck’s narrative and, not coincidentally, also Dirk, actually seems to endorse: Davekat. The pathway is not just love, but understanding. Lack of the latter is what torpedoes every other Homestuck ship, in every other timeline, including Dirk’s own attempt to find home in another, his own pathologically magnetic and ultimately destructive love. And so when Dirk seizes the narrative he immediately betrays the impulse toward resolution by blowing up every relationship except Dave’s, because Dave is his special boy and also the better version of himself who deserves everything that Dirk doesn’t.

Dirk needs to believe he’s the villain of the story to be relevant. He maintains he’s fundamentally a good person while insisting on amoral or frequently just immoral action, because Dirk believes that he is operating under a morally just system of determining what is necessary and what constitutes the ‘greater good’ according to the terms of crafting a compelling story. And yet by exerting metanarrative power, he throws the story’s entire axis of morality into question: we’re not usually privy to the explicit and unconscious motivations of the teller of any given story we’re reading, and those motivations are not usually so clearly a perfect storm of boredom, PTSD, and romantic rejection. Of course we can’t expect such a narrator to treat the characters fairly, if fairness has any bearing at all in the telling of a story -- and I would argue that, over the course of its nearly 1 million words, Homestuck has not shown a lot of interest in being fair. Indeed, the particular trajectory of Dirk’s influence on a story that has caused such harm to himself and those he loves might lead a reader to wonder if perhaps he’s upholding a system that is actually designed for suffering. No, I’m not going to do another ‘am I talking about X or Y?’ bit because I’m obviously still talking about Sburb and Homestuck itself, but I am definitely hinting at talking about some other stuff at the same time. The law. Gender roles. The Patriarchy. It turns out that, once you start to explore and embrace masculinity, given the context of all the harm it has done or has been professed to have done throughout history and radiating into the future, you eventually have to decide whether you’re going to keep doing the same toxic shit that other people have been doing or try to remake the trappings of masculinity in your own image.

In trying to understand my life and what I wanted out of my own expression/embodiment of masculinity, I’ve been exploring a lot of narratives and concepts that seek to eschew the tropes of what I have understood to be the mainstream (i.e. colonial, i.e. protest, i.e. toxic) form of masculinity. One of the first I latched onto was Alice Sparkly Kat’s reading of the I Ching through yaoi tropes.[13](%E2%80%9C#note13%E2%80%9D) I don’t know enough about either of these systems to render a helpful conclusion about myself based on what each of them brings to the table, but I apparently have a sufficient understanding of narrative to map the concept as a whole onto, what else, Homestuck. One can pretty easily locate Dirk on the 24/Returning point of the wheel: power in decline, dominating masochism, and most importantly, returning to a lost original purpose. After all, he is literally attempting to return Homestuck to its original purpose, i.e. a story about some kids who play a game and are super traumatized by it but it’s ok because they make a new universe or whatever. Dirk’s insistence on the cyclical seems to suggest that the larger purpose of creating Homestuck stories is to keep Paradox Space running, a thing that only exists in Homestuck, so whoops it’s actually a literal paradox. Like protest masculinity, it is one that is incredibly stupid once you break it down and is only self-sustaining by feeding other, more vulnerable things to it.

But Dirk hasn’t completely given himself over to the standard kind of patriarchal masculinity you’d expect of a world-building sovereign. As a distributor of life and death, he isn’t churning them out in perfect harmony but continually confusing one for the other. More accomplished Dirk scholars than myself have argued quite competently that Dirk has no idea what he’s doing,[14](%E2%80%9C#note14%E2%80%9D) so I’ll just add that Dirk’s attempts at ‘Cyclical harmony. The unstoppable pull of constant conjunction. […] the impossible cosmology of a seemingly meaningless group of events that come together to form a cohesive whole. Pulling form from entropy.’ and so forth are a floundering expression of ouroboric reflection and remixing of the stakes he’s assumed are universally important because they just happen to be the stakes that have shaped him and given him purpose. The Life Instinct contorted through the Death Instinct. The queered and queering process of self-recognition and self-design through the other.

As totally normal people do, in order to understand how narrative, betrayal, and gender fit into all this, I made a chart:

Dirk studying Alpha Dave to become a hard manly dude | > | Dirk meeting Beta Dave and refusing to become Bro | > | Dirk giving in to his ego and becoming UltDirk  
---|---|---|---|---  
[rising masc] | > | [declining masc] | > | [rising masc again]  
me rejecting gender as a kid and becoming ‘one of the boys’ | > | me embracing womanhood as feminist praxis | > | me walking away from femininity as part of my repressed sexuality  
  
It is neither my design nor my impression of reasonable behavior to posit a moral equivalence to these two trajectories, and when I first laid this out I assumed that one was about morality and one was about gender, but looking at it now, I realize that of course they are both about gender, and once you include our very narrow modern understandings of masculinity in the consideration, they do also become about morality. It’s worth noting that they are flipped along the axis of refusal, and work along two different flavors thereof: Dirk’s refusal is engaging that prescription of masculinity that is more aligned with the Death Instinct, whereas mine is engaging a more generalized cisheteronormative prescription of femininity. But they both engage questions of betrayal. Will you betray your indoctrination and cultural programming? Will you betray the heteronormative demand of weaponized, individualized gender roles? Will you betray the narrative promise of fulfillment and relevance?

Embracing my masculinity felt, as a core concept, like a betrayal. Of my feminism, of my nominally-heterosexual partner and our nominally-heterosexual relationship, of every torment I’d endured and every achievement I’d made on both of those fronts, of the infinite and delicious variety of trans identity, of my love affair with refusal in general. (I am, after all, a Void player.) Unfortunately, it was also fucking _thrilling._ It felt very much like disappearing into the ocean of myself and finding that I am, indeed, magnificent.

But what’s easy to forget is that once Dirk disappears into the infinity of himself, he is once again completely alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 2 https://medium.com/@RoseOfNobility/force-and-flow-steal-and-serve-83c1e077c50f [ back ]  
> 3 Much has been made, both within and around the narrative, of Dirk’s un(?)ironic appreciation of the animes, and his insertion of/response to the ‘believe in me who believes in you’ moment in the Epilogues is confirmation enough. [ back ]  
> 4 https://twitter.com/alicesparklykat/status/1222692784970391563 [ back ]  
> 5 It’s interesting to note that, in Modernist narratives, this kind of masculinity emerges as a response to aggressively promiscuous, unfaithful women partners -- compare this to Dirk’s behavior in the Meat route as a response to Jake’s heterosexual promiscuity, which is itself a compulsory front to a queerness that Jake’s cultural template of Manhood cannot understand or accept. Noted Jake scholars 0pacifica and Tomatograter have important and much better-articulated things to say about the Jake side of things here, and have greatly informed my reading thereof. [ back ]  
> 6 Both [this thread from also-noted Homestuck scholar 0pacifica](https://twitter.com/0pacifica/status/1290140005042540545) and [this essay from The Sublemon](https://thesublemon.tumblr.com/post/173556346632/post-myth-part-1) explain the concept of post-myth better than I have space to do here. [ back ]  
> 7 Contrast Dave and Dirk’s individual approaches to the ironic coolguy facade: Dave has ironic oversharing built into his persona so that he can ramble freely without having to actually own anything he says, whereas Dirk has not allowed himself any mechanism for sharing his feelings on any register. The shame Dirk experiences from Hal’s ‘ironic’ but uncomfortably transparent oversharing is what triggers the majority of Dirk’s self-policing from Act 6 onward. [ back ]  
> 8 From her essay “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” originally published in _Feminist Theory._ [ back ]  
> 9 https://yasminnair.com/your-trauma-is-your-passport-hannah-gadsby-nanette-and-global-citizenship/ [ back ]  
> 10 Specifically, a Knight of Void, combining oD’s aforementioned class theory and [0pacifica’s aspect theory](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24199798) to mean one who acts through the will of meaning’s fundamental expansive tendency in order to benefit others. I would add that that sounds a lot like what I’m doing with this essay if I really thought this essay was benefiting anyone but myself. [ back ]  
> 11 For the record: Vriska Did Nothing Wrong. [ back ]  
> 12 Compare this to when I learned about [同志](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongzhi_\(term\)#Usage_in_contemporary_Macau_and_Hong_Kong), an umbrella term for queer people in Taiwan, Macau, and Hong Kong which also means ‘comrade’ in the political sense and roughly translates to ‘same will’ or ‘same purpose.’ The Death Instinct rises in individualistic formations of identity once again. [ back ]  
> 13 http://www.alicesparklykat.com/articles/101/Reading_the_I_Ching_Through_Yaoi/ [ back ]  
> 14 https://medium.com/@RoseOfNobility/pulling-the-strings-dirk-as-manipulative-puppetmaster-ba781ad33c2c [ back ]


	3. Through the Fourth Wall

### Through the Fourth Wall

Ok, I acknowledge that I’ve got a lot of irons in the fire here. Tangled web, mixed metaphors, etc. I have raised a lot of questions and answered precisely none of them. I have specifically refused to even raise further questions. I have spent a lot of time explaining what I am not talking about. (Sorry, Void player.) So what am I talking about?

Let me return briefly to the epigraph I dropped at the top of this dumpster fire of circuitously obtuse prose -- what a reader might understandably expect to stand as a pilfered and substantially more articulate, if simultaneously cryptic, mission statement for the bullshit I was about to unravel:

> The story is a dream of healing, but it is not healing in and of itself. … The story is a dream of the revolution, but it is not a revolution on its own. … The story is a dream of love and the seed of love and a map for love, but it takes people, not stories, to love each other. And here, the storyteller learns that the life of the story and the life of the teller are separate, though intertwined. The storyteller comes to understand that the telling of a good story is not the same as living a full life, though one informs the other. The storyteller learns that the love a story-listener has for the story is not the same as the love of one person for another.

Dirk understands that ‘the story’ is separate from ‘real life’ in that he’s explicitly reified one over the other. And, at the same time, he has an unfortunate tendency to assign story structure and roles to the people in his life: Jane is the protagonist; Jake is the love interest; Roxy is maybe also the protagonist but Dirk has had to accept that Roxy is doing a different thing that Dirk doesn’t really have access to; Dave is the classical hero; etc. And has Dirk really extricated the love for the story from the love for the storyteller in his own need for love? Or has he decided that he’s not worthy of love for a person, so he’d settle for the love for a story?

Whoops, more question marks. I mean surprise noodles.[15](%E2%80%9C#note15%E2%80%9D)

We’re getting into weird territory here when we start treating Dirk both as a fictional character who knows he’s fictional and as a human being getting into some metafictional shit. On some level, it really does not matter whether Dirk understands the separation of creator and creation, because Dirk Strider is not real and cannot hurt you.[16](%E2%80%9C#note16%E2%80%9D) But, of course, the _figure_ of Dirk is real. His existence has an effect on you (or at least me), should you choose to engage with his story -- both the story told to you about him and the story about himself that he’s telling you. There are paradoxical stakes to this interaction, kind of akin to the parasocial, that both is and isn’t a thing that exists in reality. It exists in _your_ (my) reality, sure. Does that not ripple into reality-at-large, wherever that might be?

I mean, let me take this essay’s title at face value for a second. _Must_ Dirk Strider be ‘good’? Must a man, one who has scraped and clawed and cobbled his manhood together from the littered remains of a dead culture—one which not only endured but openly celebrated more than a few men who were not good, though it called them ‘great’—be good? Dirk and the culture that he’s built himself from have certainly given that an emphatic ‘nah, dogg.’ He knows that goodness and indeed the question thereof is a quality of the disposable, and he is a disposer, and this is a viewpoint that has been endorsed by both the Death Instinct version of masculinity and Paradox Space (which, as I’ve established, are the same thing). But an audience with a moral compass cares about goodness, and the telling of a story cares about its audience, however it may choose to express that. And this story has refused to find Dirk disposable, and it has also refused to find him unambiguously not-good. So even though Dirk has insisted that to be good is, to him, irrelevant, in the very act of the telling of his story Homestuck is like, ‘nah, bitch, you were always already worthy.’

I suppose I’m similarly uninterested in the question of whether Dirk needs to be ‘good’ and, therefore, redeemed/redeemable because I am uninterested in stories, or audiences thereof, that demand queer characters be perfectly redeemable. Their queerness has already, to some degree, humanized them to me, because I am an organism capable of recognizing itself in a mirror. Their actions and betrayals make the story compelling because I suppose the Dirk in me also likes seeing what happens to people you love but who aren’t exactly people to you, in the deepest empathetic sense, under extreme duress. But to me there is already a deep empathy in portraying an absolute gay disaster. After all, I find it impossible to empathize with anyone who never shows a crack in their armor of pure goodness or a stray hair in their immaculately twirled moustache of villainy: there’s a discomforting unrealism to relentless comfort, and there’s a certain comfort in getting discomfortable. And so I love Dirk specifically for all the reasons that he is not a nice normal boy. I love watching him flail about and do unreasonable things and hurt himself and his friends and fuck up constantly, because I thrive on extreme emotions as an outlet for my own unbearable interior life. The turbulent ocean is not placated but brought into resonance with the turbulence from the outside. I like to see the not-quite-people I love do bad things not because I want to be validated in doing bad things myself, but because I seek validation in the universal capacity for being a little bit shitty. And beyond that, I don’t just go to stories for characters to love; I want to understand.

Am I looking for instructions or a mirror?

In an earlier skeleton of this essay, I thought it would end with Dirk’s redemption arc, so I had all these notes about Brain Ghost Dirk and a kind of third-entity of relation that had a catchy but ultimately incorrect name. I was going to talk about hurt/comfort and camp and Hard Lads and important failure. Predictably and unfortunately, as a Void player, I have an extraordinarily difficult time winding down to a single conclusion. I’m really not sure where I was ever going with this and I sure as shit don’t know how to wrap it up in a neat little bow. However, after nearly 8,000 words I feel I can say this with some certainty: I don’t have to be able to love Dirk Strider, Narrator and/or Villain of Homestuck^2, in order for him to mean something to me, but I do have to -- or, at least, I _want_ to -- be able to love the Dirk Strider who lives inside me. Our culture has a whole thing about self-love[17](%E2%80%9C#note17%E2%80%9D) that I don’t have time to get into and that, for lack of nuance, I don’t fully subscribe to, so maybe it’s more like self-respect I’m after. In that sense, I owe it to myself to construct my queer model of something-like-masculine identity after personas that bring me joy or at least meaning, and I suppose that’s the grand scheme of what I’m after with queer representation. Something that will feed my endless tapeworm of Desiring Meaning. Singularities that I can dump into the black hole of Contemplating My Existence.[18](%E2%80%9C#note18%E2%80%9D) Yes, it’s instructions and a mirror. Fortunately, Homestuck is like a bullet through a mirror, a million reflections on yourself.[19](%E2%80%9C#note19%E2%80%9D) Kind of like our splintery boi here. (Oh shit, am I secretly a Heart player?) The point is that it’s not necessarily about being Deep -- you don’t have to curate a singular meaning, or even the Best Meaning, ok phew I’m still Voidy enough -- so much as it is about providing an infinitude of different pathways to understanding yourself and everyone else. And the more sprawling, indulgent, and disastrous, the more cracks in the mirror, the more there is to reflect. So, yes, to answer the second question in this essay’s title -- bring on that messy bitch. And loudly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 15 Hey isn’t it weird that trolls call question marks ‘surprise noodles’? Does the absence of knowledge that precipitates a question necessarily and essentially contain a quality of suddenness? Is the sundering of the veil always such a violent occurrence? Can’t it happen gradually? [ back ]  
> 16 [citation needed] [ back ]  
> 17 https://holapapi.substack.com/p/how-do-i-fall-in-love-with-myself [ back ]  
> 18 I haven’t studied astrophysics since 2004 do not @ me. [ back ]  
> 19 [Forever Endeavor](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xS3vfF9fjM) [ back ]


End file.
